If 2008 can proffer a more touching moment than the closing strains of Friend Of Ours it will be a high achievement indeed. The closing track for Elbow’s latest, The Seldom Seen Kid, and the album as a whole is dedicated to the memory of one Bryan Glancy – a local singer-songwriter who passed away in 2006.

The resulting effect of which has galvanized the Manchester five piece into producing a stirring album that satisfies both the head and the heart; and for a band who have released consistently brilliant albums (even scoring an unprecedented four straight 9/10s in the pages of NME), that’s high praise indeed.

Returning to the album’s closing moments, against a simple but lush backdrop, frontman Guy Garvey comes across as a working class poet intoning “Never very good/at goodbyes… Love you mate.” It’s a lyric that struggles to deal with the emotions of death and doubly with a fitting means to express them that will have even the strongest bloke sobbing into his beer.

While Garvey’s lyrical tact is at its trickiest on other tracks, its here that it attains its highest resonance; coming just after the anthemic chorus of One Day Like This, it’s a fitting emotional end to an album that is at times celebratory and optimistic, at others mournful and po-faced, but always beautiful.

Sonically it’s perfectly pitched to enrich the songs’ lyrical trajectory or mood, thanks in no small part to the band’s keyboardist Craig Potter who produces for the first time. His keys pushed to the front of the mix along with Garvey’s barstool poetry in a series of careful arrangements, such as The Bones Of You’s combination of Gospel choir, distorted guitars and gentle arpeggios. Even having time to sample Gershwin’s Summertime in its hushed coda.

It’s not all dizzying highs and draining lows however, Weather To Fly is a glorious dalliance while Grounds For Divorce unleashes a Blues stomp complete with call and response chanting and buzz saw bass. The highest point of escape comes with The Fix, a 1960’s inflected duet with Sheffield songwriter, Richard Hawley. Its organ grind and cooing harmonies wouldn’t be out of place on a Danny Elfman score, as long as it was sound tracking a film narrative about a fixed horse race gone right – as it does here. The pair singing “too many times we've been postally pipped/we've loaded the saddles, the mickeys are slipped/we're swapping the turf for the sand and the surf and the sin/cause the fix is in,” you can almost see the pair grinning like Cheshire cats.

It’s just one of many, many memorable moments in an album brim full of them, and although elbow make it sound easy, in reality it took the death of a loved one and a lot of artistic craft to realize the finished product. But the group can rest comfortably in knowing the end result was worth it.

5 Emphatic Stars out of 5